Day Tripper

The travel section of my weekend was composed of two trips: one to Cartago and the other to Volcán Poás.


Cartago was the colonial capital of Costa Rica from the 1500s to the mid-1800s, when the capital was moved to San José. Today, Cartago holds two main attractions: las Ruinas de la Parroquia, and la Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Los Ángeles.


Las Ruinas were the result of a 1910 earthquake which destroyed the church located on the Plaza Mayor of the city. Rather than rebuild the church, the locals decided to leave some of the walls standing and convert the interior into a garden.





The other more major attraction in Cartago is the National Basilica, dedicated to La Negrita, Costa Rica's patron saint. The story goes that a little indigenous girl found a statuette of the Virgin Mary on a stone in the forest. She took the statuette home and the next morning discovered it was gone. She found the statuette in the same place in the forest later that day. She took it home again, and the same thing happened the next day. She told the local priest, who took the statuette to his office for study and also found it gone the next day, back sitting on the same stone in the forest. These events were later proclaimed a miracle by the Church and a church (later to become the Basilica) was constructed over the rock, where a statuette of the Virgin Mary still sits today (Though I saw the statuette in the basement of the basilica, I did not want to take a picture for you while some locals were praying in front of it).

Today, the Basilica serves as a pilgrimage site. People walk, sometimes for weeks, from places as far away as Nicaragua and Panama to pay homage to La Negrita. Below is a view of the inside of the Basilica. The kneeling men in the main aisle are crawling towards the front on their knees.

After a day of religious relics, ex voto offerings and pilgrimages straight out of Honors 101, I took a completely different trip to Volcán Poás, a couple hours drive from the city. There is a park there with a lookout over the quasi-active crater. The area just around the rim reeks of sulfur (or perhaps as I originally thought, scrambled eggs).

A couple hours of hiking later, we descended down from the volcano and I managed to snap this shot of the Valle Central from the bus. The cities of San José, Alajuela, Heredia and all of their suburbs lie here, accounting for about 1/3 of the nation's population.

Election Day tomorrow!!! I'll be checking out the city's festivities up until the start of the Super Bowl.

Pura vida,

Eric